‘She was fifty-eight,’ said Saunders; and though genuinely shocked by the disaster I couldn’t help being amused for a moment by the exactness of his information—it was so characteristic of him that he knew the woman’s age to a year. ‘No,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t the sort of thing that should happen in the ordinary course of nature.’
‘She had some shock,’ I suggested.
Saunders nodded. ‘The most cruel shock.’
‘And you no doubt were in her confidence,’ I insinuated.
Observing the curiosity that I tried politely to dissemble, he looked at me for one silent moment and smiled. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. You’re a discreet fellow, and if you weren’t such a misguided heretic I could find it in my heart to like you. Well, the cause of Miss Lettice’s collapse was a psychological phenomenon that has a very old-fashioned name.’
I waited for him to go on.
‘A broken heart,’ said Saunders. ‘Miss Lettice is the victim of a hopeless passion.’
‘A hopeless passion,’ I protested, ‘at fifty-eight!’
Saunders drew his left hand from his jacket pocket and with it a pouchful of tobacco, which he tossed into my lap. ‘You’re not in a hurry for ten minutes?’
I am never in a hurry when Saunders settles down into his chair with that air of pensive reminiscence; so, when we had both got our pipes going, he told me the story.